Animacy versus Rhyming in the Grammatical Agreement of Swahili Augmentatives and Diminutives

Abstract

This article is an attempt made at looking at various types of grammatical agreement or concord of Swahili augmentatives and diminutives as well as disambiguating and reinterpreting individual solutions, which are typically and inevitably characterized by indeterminacy and even confusion in one way or another. Central to the grammatical conundrum associated with Swahili augmentatives and diminutives is animacy, whose consideration is a crucial factor in deciding noun class membership. A number of idiosyncratic gender conflict resolutions and somewhat contradictory reactions of grammatical agreement of Swahili augmentatives and diminutives notwithstanding, prescriptive rules have erroneously applied animacy as the paramount criterion for grammatical treatment. In the Swahili language a grammatical distinction is, as a rule, made between animate and inanimate nouns, and this leads to making animacy a predominant factor in determining grammatical agreement. Data from actual language usage are drawn from daily conversations, mass and social media, literary works, textbooks and proverbs to substantiate that speakers do not strictly abide by the grammatical and semantic principles of animacy. Instead of turning simply to animacy, speakers show a tendency to rely on so-called mechanical agreement with animate nouns of the augmentative (5/6) and diminutive (7/8) classes. As a rule, semantic agreement is treated as a norm, while mechanical agreement is defined to be marked. However, this binary has its loophole because even mechanical agreement seems to be triggered by semantically motivated gender assignment particularly when it comes to augmentatives and diminutives. The so-called mechanical agreement is deliberately used to create and highlight the rhyming effects that have something to do with pleasant, emphatic, musical and rhythmic values. In this sense and for this reason mechanical agreement has not to be treated just simply to be mechanical in its literal sense of the word.